Biography
Playwright, writer, and theater maker Heidi Kraay examines the link between brain and body, seeking empathy with fractured characters. Her work pulls myth, metaphor, and monsters together to attempt connections across difference. For this residency, Ms. Kraay focuses on two plays for young audiences. The first is an adaptation of Elisabeth McKetta’s poetic children’s book Ark, which looks at the early days of Covid-19 through a young girl who lives in a tiny house. She finds renewed purpose during the lockdown by rescuing abandoned dogs from her neighborhood. Her family tries to accommodate her mission in their shared yard and small space. The second is a retelling of the werewolf story, featuring a girl who runs away from her hometown bullies and ends up living with a wolf pack. The longer she stays, the more she identifies with her new family, becoming a wolf at ease in her skin for the first time. In order to find true peace, she must face her past, returning to her human body with wolf spirit inside. Whenever the moon is full, she rejoins her chosen family, and meanwhile she belongs to herself. Both plays explore how we find ourselves through difficult times.
Ms. Kraay’s work has been presented in Idaho, regionally, in NYC and internationally, most recently through the Women’s Theatre Festival, Fargo Moorhead Community Theatre, Playwrights’ Round Table, Trinity Street Players, Georgia’s One Minute Play Festival, HomeGrown Theatre, Thingamajig Theatre Company, and Tomo Suru Players. Her work has been awarded funding from several Boise city and Idaho state grants. Ms. Kraay is an adjunct profession through the Department of Theatre, Film, and Creative Writing at Boise State University and a teaching artist through The Cabin. She holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts from California Institute of Integral Studies and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.
VIRTUAL READING & ARTIST TALK
HEIDI KRAAY
Sunday, April 11th | 2:00pm
Heidi Kraay will be joined by Thomas Paul to read excerpts from the two plays she developed during the residency followed by a Q&A.